


Skin and Bones

by inlovewithnight



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-10
Updated: 2010-02-10
Packaged: 2017-10-07 04:06:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 842
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/61267
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/pseuds/inlovewithnight





	Skin and Bones

He's older than he used to be, and even older than he is, thanks to months spent in an Eden when all he wanted was to fall. And at the same time, he's younger than he is, life forced back in through his chest like water turning back and refusing the drain. Life is water, the percentage of blood and tears and sweat beneath the skin. On Atlantis it's all around him and seeping in through his skin and his breath, filling him from the core and flowing through his veins like the ice of Antarctica couldn't.

He was content there, as much as anywhere else he'd ever been, but he was waiting, stasis-still in the cold and the quiet, aging with the creak of the ice. Here the rush and sigh of the waves is constant; he hears it in his sleep and his blood moves with it and he's younger here than he was there, so much younger now than then.

He was born on earth and reborn under fire, over and over again, every time he puts his life on the line for cause/city/country/comrade. And every time it's handed back to him, dirty around the edges but still whole and warm. Reshaped and retouched and relived under hallucinatory devices with a gun in his hand and a bullet in Rodney's chest.

He has a body, flesh and blood and bone and, he remembers being told in church on Sunday mornings, an immortal soul bound to live in God's hands eternity without end, amen. He hasn't put much thought into that, the idea that some part of him might live forever, not now when he's trying to keep the rest of him and his alive. If there is a soul under his skin, he's not sure it won't betray him the way his body has, going native with a bug bite and pumping poison through its own veins.

He has the men and women under his command, his teams of soldiers, a corps, and trace that back and you find another word for body, another word from those Sunday morning churches at his mother's side. _Corpus_, this is the resurrection and the life, glory hallelujah.

He doesn't know much about glory. It's a slippery idea, one that some people find in war and some people find in God, and that he personally can't think of finding anywhere except maybe the way the wind carries the sunrise up across the water to Atlantis. He can see that, feel it on his skin, and that's the kind of glory that comes as close as it can to serving a purpose.

He lives in the moment, the now, the rush of adrenaline in his veins and the stretch and ache of muscles and the don't-think-can't-think moment between sighting and pulling the trigger. Those could be a kind of glory, except glory should be bigger than the body, outside the skin and bones, something only seen in glimpses while life stumbles on. Glory and horror both, best seen in pieces, though he's had enough horror stare him full-on in the face in this galaxy to wonder if the rules aren't different here.

His body marks the differences, in aches and pains and creaking joints and scars. That daily run is important, first thing after sunrise, keeping as close to Ronon's heels as he can to force the stiffness and soreness down and away under the sing-song buzz of breath and blood in his ears that tells him he's alive alive alive and kicking and he made it through another night at least. Night, when the monsters come out to play, like his cousin told him after church one Sunday, when he was a whole lot younger and a whole lot smarter than he was for years before he came to Atlantis, because he'd known that the monsters were real.

His daddy told him that if a monster showed up, he should take his baseball bat and knock the bastard right between the eyes. He still thinks about that when they go out to go fighting. Hit them. Shoot them. Knock them down and make them say uncle, and then shoot them anyway, because if there's anything he's learned it's that the monsters lie and cheat and don't fight fair.

He's familiar with the practice. He's human, after all. Not a saint. Never going to be a saint. Saints end up as pieces of bone and rags and legend. He's just a man, going to live and die and be done with, not remembered at all except by a few people he's met and known and touched. And there won't be anything left but a body and whatever work he managed to get done before the end.

Atlantis has given him a chance to make that work matter. He gave up on churches and their vision of the holy a long time ago, but standing in this city, looking out over the waters, he thinks he has a second chance at grace.


End file.
